Unsanctioned authorship

I just sent this email to a scientific editors' email forum. If you are interested in commenting, please add your comments to this blog, and I can include them in a summary of the discussion:

I am interested in the phenomenon of authors adding co-authors to their papers, without first consulting the so-called co-authors. I get the feeling that this is something that is rare, but gradually increasing. I think that people might do it to make their papers look more authoritative, or to drive up citations by adding a highly-cited author. Clearly, it is bad practice and I was wondering what could be done to ensure that it does not happen.

My impression from the publishers is that their aim is to ensure that if it does happen, they are not culpable. They will have had the corresponding author sign a declaration that all of the authors are aware of the paper and are validly listed as co-authors. Yet this does not overcome the problem, it merely moves the liability for the problem, in my own view.

Is this something we should be worried about? Should we seek explicit acknowledgement from each author that they have indeed played an instrumental role in the production of the paper? Or is it sufficient to identify this as the sole responsibility of the corresponding author? I would very much like to hear your thoughts on this issue.

Authorship

Some years ago, when I was modifying the ARCOM model paper layout to deal with issues of authorship, I suggested the following text: "Authorship should respect the rights of those involved in the production of the paper. The person who wrote most of the text should be the first-named author, even if this is a student. The sequence of authors should reflect the magnitude of each person’s contribution to the text of the particular paper. Supervisors, grant-holders and heads of department should not automatically be added as authors unless they took part in the writing of the paper. If a junior person wrote the paper, and a senior person helped with the editing, structuring and drafting, the senior person should be acknowledged in the acknowledgements, but merely helping to guide someone through the writing process does not warrant authorship."

A colleague on the ARCOM committee responded, thus: "I cannot come to terms with your recommendation to add a text in the Model Paper about the Authorship. I think it is too prescriptive and does not recognize the variety of possibilities that might well be legitimate. There are a diversity of efforts that go into undertaking a research and converting the results into papers. To reduce them into "the person who wrote the most of the text" is an understatement. Obviously there are certain practices that are not acceptable: not reading the paper on which your name comes first is on that radar and plagiarism is at the heart of that radar."

My response was: "I see what you mean. I agree that the world is more complex than the monochrome vision that I paint. And, yes, I agree that I am overstating the case. That is what I usually do! My reason for habitually overstating the case is that it makes it easier to explain, and easier to disagree with. Your rejoinder makes me realize that I should precede my suggested words by making it clear that they are only suggested guidelines which may result in a different approach for particular authors at particular times, but which would at least prompt an informed discussion between authors. My motivation is to empower junior authors to actually have this discussion with their senior co-authors. If they decide that this suggested policy is not appropriate in their case, then OK. I know it sounds prescriptive, but I did not mean to produce a set of rules, so, yes, I should re-phrase it. I wanted to provide an indication of what would be equitable, so that authors did not have to wait until they were more senior to become first authors, by which time they were no longer the primary progenitors of the text!"

Interestingly, none of this text is present in the guidelines now, so we must have got distracted by other matters. I still think that it is important to be clear about authorship of papers, and I still find that it is quite common for senior academics to have their names as authors despite sometimes having little or no involvement in the development or drafting of the paper.

The issue is important, and I quite like the Wikipedia entry about authorship

To withdraw or not to withdraw?

A colleague from another University asked me a question: he submitted a paper to an international journal and had received no response after 10 months. He tried to contact the editor and his secretary said that the review process has started but they have not received all the responses from reviewers. Did I think it is OK for him to write a formal letter to withdraw the paper now? Or should he wait until the decision is made, no matter how long it takes? I was quick to advise him as follows.

In my experience, the gathering of referee reports is a burdensome task for an editor and the editorial office. One of the reasons that it can take so many months to get reports is that referees often do not answer promptly, or they say they will carry out the task, then change their minds, or they are just slow because of all the other demands on their time. Often, over a period of many months, we might find that we have tried 20 different referees in order to end up with the requisite four reports.

After all this work it is very annoying to then discover that the author wants to withdraw the paper! However, if the paper is rejected, then there is no real problem. Alternatively, if the decision is Major, or Reject & Resubmit, then that is an opportunity for the author to say to the editor that the requirements are just too harsh, and that he or she would prefer to withdraw it. But if an editor calls for minor revisions, or simply accepts the paper, the author really should not withdraw it. It would be bad protocol, because the editorial office and the referees wouyld have been working through this process for no reason. Perhaps the question to ask is, why would an author want to withdraw a paper mid-way through a long refereeing process? I have come across situations where an author has realized, too late, that there are such significant flaws in the paper that it really should go no further. This would need some careful dialogue wit the editor, explaining why the paper cannot continue in the process.

I summed up my advice thus. Therefore, you need pretty strong reasons for withdrawal. Either the editor's requirements are too harsh, or you have discovered some aspect of the paper that renders it unpublishable. I don't think that you should withdraw for any other reason, unless you want to upset the editor!

Authorship of journal papers

The Co-operative Network of Building Researchers list, cnbr-l, saw a fresh enquiry today about authorship of journal papers. I was interested that the person who prompted the enquiry appears to be a rock climber. The essence of this question was this, I’d like to invite discussion of the (possibly contentious) issue of authorship of (journal) papers in construction management – particularly who is named as authors, and in what order, when PhD candidates or other new scholars write papers. This is an issue on which I have strong views, so I responded thus:

You raise a useful and interesting question. My own view is that authorship should not be simply a right of those in authority to have their name on things whether they contributed to them or not. For what it is worth, here is how I put it in a chapter of a recent book:

One worrying aspect of authorship is the question of whether all the authors actually contributed to the writing of the text in the paper. There are different traditions in different areas of science. For example, in some sciences, the head of the institution, the head of the research team, the technicians who provided the resources to enable the research are all cited as joint authors, even though they may have contributed none of the text. In other areas, only those who directly contributed text would be listed as authors. The latter tends to be the case in construction management, although there are some notable exceptions. Because we operate with different assumptions, there is confusion around this issue, and all authors should clarify who will be listed, and in what sequence, before they begin work on their papers, to avoid divisive and difficult arguments later in the process. One alternative to joint authorship, for someone who is not actually an author, is to include mention of them in the acknowledgements (Hughes, W.P. (2008) Getting your research published in refereed journals. In: Knight, A. and Ruddock, L (eds). Advanced Research Methods in the Built Environment, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 193-206)

To answer your questions directly, my opinion is that PhD students should be encouraged to write sole author papers, and it is the responsibility of the supervisor to help structure the paper, comment on drafts, and help see it through the publication process, in the role of supervisor, not in the role of co-author. But I know that this is not everyone’s preference. If a supervisor actually writes part of the paper, then of course that would justify co-authorship. However, in any serious evaluation of one person’s contribution to the field, such as a promotion panel, it is common to ask the candidate to indicate what percentage of each co-authored paper was contributed specifically by the candidate. This avoids any need to develop an algorithm for assessing the strength of authorship when there are multiple authors (as suggested by another respondent to your question).

This question is not a “construction management” issue, but an issue across all the sciences. You might be interested in a broader discussion here: http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/services/authorship.cfm where I particularly liked the opening sentence, “Studies of authorship in science suggest that traditional criteria for authorship no longer reflect the way research is actually done. Although published guidelines on authorship have existed for decades, investigations reveal that they are not followed consistently, and many researchers remain unaware of them.” I think many of us are unaware of the guidelines that already exist, and we are in danger of re-inventing the wheel, yet again! In the biomedical arena, for example, an “author” is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study (http://www.icmje.org/index.html#author).

My advice is that all authors should clarify who will be listed, and in what sequence, before they begin work on their papers, to avoid divisive and difficult arguments later in the process. To help PhD students in such discussions with their supervisors, the links to more established sciences may be of use. And I think you are right to suggest that professors do not need lots of co-authored papers on their CVs, especially conference papers.

By the way, another horror story about authorship – what about those thrusting young academics who make informal agreements to add each other’s names to all of their papers, even when they have not actually contributed, exchanging multiple authorships as favours just to pad out their CVs? Do you think that actually happens? Is it ethical? What should a journal editor do on discovering such “phantom” authorships?

I hope this helps, and I look forward to other opinions on this thorny issue.

Multiple authorship

New Scientist, in its Feedback column of 18 July 1998, wondered how may scientists it takes to write a research paper. Their readers discovered some remarkable papers. One with 562 authors in Physics Letters B (vol 231, p 539). Then another with 596 authors in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research (vol 289, p 35). 718 authors were found on one paper in The Canadian Journal of Cardiology (vol 12, p 127). But the clear winner appears to be something identified by the judges of the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for literature. They deemed E. Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong and their 972 coauthors (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 329, p 673) worthy of the award for their achievement in "publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages". Can that record be beaten?

They also thought about which paper cited the largest number of institutions. One reader found 143 institutions listed in a single paper in The Lancet (vol 342, p 821).

And we thought multiple authorship was getting excessive!